The Fourth Sunday of Lent (2025)
While the young son was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.”
But his father ordered his servants, “Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.”
—Luke 15:20-24
On October 1, 1950, a 27-year-old man was executed in Paris. His crime was the murder of a police officer during a botched robbery.
Jacques Fesch, the murderer, was a victim of neglect by his parents and the isolation and boredom that can accompany a life of privilege.
He was a rake. He lived a restless life, wandering from relationship to relationship and job to job, eventually finding himself the father of an unwanted child in an unhappy marriage; after he and his wife split, he fathered another child (who eventually ended up lost in the foster system) with another woman. However, like the “Prodigal Son” of Luke’s Gospel, Jacques also came to know the joy and peace of those who receive forgiveness and unmerited, unconditional love.
A photo taken of Jacques Fesch on March 3, 1954, shortly after his arrest
The three years that Jacques spent in solitary confinement, awaiting execution, was a time of conversion and transformation. In the desert of his prison cell, he learned what it meant to love his young daughter and his mother, with whom he was reconciled before his execution. He found a friend and support in the prison chaplain. His cold indifference to his fate and the world around him—as well as his hostile feelings toward God—gave way to a profound sense of sorrow for his crime and serenity rooted in prayer and faith.
An unlikely mystic, his prison journals reveal a man whose life was transformed by God’s reconciling and healing love.
Today, Jacques Fesch is being considered as a candidate for canonization.
The story of the “Prodigal Son” reminds us that any one of us can wander away from God’s love, restlessly seeking our own path. At the same time, this wandering doesn’t automatically mean that we’re bad or that we are sinners. It’s simply a matter of choice.
In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen reflected,
“Leaving home means ignoring the truth that God has ‘fashioned me in secret, molded me in the depths of the earth and knitted me together in my mother’s womb’ (Psalm 139:13). Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home and must look far and wide to find one.”
And yet, as the life of Jacques Fesch reminds us, even as we attempt to “leave home,” setting off on our own to assert our independence, God remains at our side.
This helps to bring us to the first lesson of that Lent and the Parable of the Prodigal Son can teach us and it’s the same lesson that Jacques Fesch learned during his years of imprisonment: We come to know ourselves through loss and it is then that we can become free to see who we really are and what we’re really made of.
This gift of self-knowledge is, above all else, a lesson in humility—a simple and unimpeded view of ourselves as we are before God.
Humility empowers us to leave behind the illusion of our self-sufficiency and self-love so that we can return home to the Father when we have wandered away.
The story of the Prodigal Son reminds us that God is ever-patient and always willing to welcome us home, regardless of what we might have done or of how far we have strayed.
All of this becomes an invitation for us… First, it is, of course, an invitation for us to reflect on how we celebrate the reality of God’s tender mercy in our own lives as disciples of Jesus. But, even beyond this, is a deeper opportunity to reflect on how we proclaim the Good News of mercy to a world crying out for mercy and compassion.
This Lenten season—and this Laetare Sunday, especially—becomes an opportunity for us to say a prayer of thanks for the mercy and peace that God offers so freely. In these days, dedicate time to reflect on how you have been lifted up and consoled by God’s mercy—a mercy that always welcomes us home—even as we are empowered to make a home for others.
To conclude, I want to share with you these words from a letter the Servant of God Jacques Fesch wrote to his mother during his final weeks in prison:
“May your love draw down upon you the mercy of the Lord, and may he let you see that within your soul a saint is sleeping. I shall ask him to make you so open and supple that you will be able to understand and do what he wants you to do. Your life is nothing; it is not even your own… You have to put to death everything within you except the desire to love God. This is not at all hard to do. It is enough to have confidence and to thank the little Jesus for all the potentialities he has placed within you. You are called to holiness, like me, like everyone, don't forget.”
O God, who through your Word
reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way,
grant, we pray,
that with prompt devotion and eager faith
the Christian people may hasten
toward the solemn celebrations to come.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
-Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
